Bush, Tower Should Stand Fast Against Smears By The Senate

February 14, 1989|By William Safire, New York Times

WASHINGTON — The ordeal of John Tower is the shame of the U.S. Senate. The man permitting the prolonged besmearing of the next secretary of defense is his successor as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sam Nunn.

Nunn is a new media icon; he exudes fairness and non-partisanship; the White House fears him and the voters of Georgia will elect him for life. Few note what his procrastination is doing to Senate traditions and to the separation of powers.

Because the senator wants to be absolutely certain of Tower's sobriety, morality and probity, he has permitted the confirmation hearings to drag on and on. As might be expected, each week with the nominee twisting in the wind invites some old political enemy or ex-wife or disgruntled former staffer to make a new charge, setting the FBI off on another investigation, providing time for more new charges.

The committee should have demanded weeks ago that the FBI answer a set of questions about the nominee against a reasonable deadline. Instead, we have an open-ended hunt for anybody who has seen the former senator drunk, for a sexual liaison that may have been a security risk, or for an aide on the take.

Tower now stands accused of being a drunk, a womanizer (a new noun for which no female equivalent has been coined) and a revolving-door sleaze; in fairness, it should be recorded that he has not been charged with pederasty, insider trading, the smoking of cornsilk, or mopery - at least not yet.

Will this hard-bitten little hard-liner (who is no drinking buddy of mine) die the death of a thousand cuts? Many in Washington now expect him to relieve the president of the public relations burden and withdraw. I think he should not and will not.

In our 200 years, only eight men selected by the president for his Cabinet have been turned down by the Senate. The most recent was in 1959, when President Dwight Eisenhower's choice for the Commerce Department, Adm. Lewis Strauss, was refused confirmation by Democrats led by Sen. Clinton Anderson, who personally despised the nominee, in a battle that had its overtones of anti-Semitism.

The reason for the tradition to confirm is the separation of power: The people elect a president and expect him to be free to choose his team to govern. The Senate has never presumed that his Cabinet choices had to please the legislative branch, no more than its choice of staffs had to please the executive branch.

Respecting Cabinet choices has nothing to do with jointly selecting judges, in which the two branches join to people the third. In our history, fully one-fourth of the nominations for Supreme Court have been turned down by the Senate; thus, the recent rejection of Judge Robert Bork should not be seen in the same constitutional ballpark as the investigation into the life style of a secretary of defense.

The deference paid to the president's Cabinet choices by the Senate is undergirded in this case by another tradition: Never in our two centuries has the Senate turned down a former senator chosen for the Cabinet. Former Senate service should count for plenty among senators, and if this unbroken practice is lightly snapped, other traditions like seniority would fray.

But what about drinking? Isn't it dangerous to appoint a man charged in hearings with inebriation to be boss of the Pentagon?

The responsibility for choosing a secretary of defense with cool nerves and a steady hand rests squarely on the president. We cannot all go sniffing breaths at the Cabinet table; we elect presidents for their judgment on this.

Fully aware of the talk, George Bush vouches for John Tower, who has sworn he has no drinking problem. It is not necessary that Nunn assume that heavy presidential responsibility - unless, in the senator's long association with the nominee in the Senate, he can testify to the contrary.

This is an endurance-building ordeal for Tower, a restraint-measuring test for the Senate, and a character trial for the president.

The other night, a former aide to Jimmy Carter advised that Bush distance himself from the nominee rather than risk his prestige so soon. That was precisely the craven action taken by Carter when his choice for CIA came under fire, causing the abandoned nominee to withdraw - and signaling Washington and the world that the new president was a wimp.

Bush should continue to support forthrightly the man he chose. Tower should stand fast. The Senate Armed Services Committee should stop making a spectacle of itself and confirm.